Grade: B

Verdict: Three outta' four stars.

Details:
• Starring: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Robert Sean Leonard
• Directed by Ricahrd Linklater
• Rated R for language and drug content

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Review: With "Tape," director Richard Link- later and longtime acting muse Ethan Hawke take one big stomp into Sam Shepard territory, with jaunts into the minefields of David Mamet and Neil LaBute. It's rugged land, marked by sheer emotional slopes and fenced with verbal barbed wire. Based on Stephen Belber's minor play and shot in six days on digital video, this chatty, drum-tight chamber drama moves on scrappy male energy and linguistic sweat. It's set entirely in a mangy motel room that is promptly filled with braying male egos and the live-wire spray of gender politics gone amuck.

Ten years after their high school graduation, old friends Vince (Hawke) and Johnny (Robert Sean Leonard) are meeting for a film festival where Johnny's debut will screen. Johnny's accomplishment puts in relief Vince's stunted evolution since school: He's a volunteer fireman and small-time drug dealer.

Bouncing drunkenly off the walls in boxer shorts, Vince greets Johnny with a salvo of feisty needling. What starts as verbal horseplay graduates to something more pointed and ugly. In an unusually brutish performance redolent of Nick Nolte, Sean Penn and the young John Malkovich in Shepard's "True West," Hawke marshals LaBute-like sadism to wring a damning confession from Johnny. And, surprise, he's captured it on tape.

The confession is a tinny bit of drama that makes little sense. Johnny, for one, seems too smart to brook Vince's bad-boy badgering.

A corrective arrives in Amy (a coolly unaffected Uma Thurman), the mens' high school sweetheart and topic of Johnny's confession. Her entrance spins "Tape" into the loaded intricacies of memory, obsession and sexual politics as Amy, now a district attorney, capsizes the juvenile mind games. She leaves the boys gape-mouthed -- and us pinched with satisfaction.

Rolling two cameras at once in the matchbox space, Linklater generates a real-time tension that abets the drama's rising mercury. Early on, the hail of rapid cuts and canted angles betrays a desperation to cinematize the play, but Linklater is quick to locate an expressive groove. (In tightly wound moments the camera ping- pongs between speakers -- a potent Scorsesean touch.)

The apt marriage of technique to form is "Tape's" triumph. Belber's play runs to the facile, but in Linklater's version his sequestered talkers retain the power to exhaust and exasperate.

— Chris Garcia, Austin American-Statesman Film Critic